Not I – review

Jaw-dropping performance … Not I at Royal Court, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

When the actor Billie Whitelaw was first given the script for Not I, legend has it she told Beckett: "You've finally done it, you've written the unlearnable and you've written the unplayable." Of course, Whitelaw famously proved herself wrong with her performance at the Royal Court in 1973, and 40 years on, Lisa Dwan returns to the same stage and demonstrates that Not I is not just learnable and playable, but it's an unforgettable eight-minute-and-45-second experience for the audience, too.

We are plunged into complete darkness, out of which looms a mouth, out of which a voice erupts in cascades of sound. Dwan's Irish cadences ensure that we recognise the everyday humanity of this woman's voice, but the fractured narrative and broken phrases mean sense and storytelling are almost completely absent. We cannot hear every word, but the torrent is somehow completely and appallingly understandable. The world becomes reduced to that anguished mouth in its tiny circle of imprisoning light.

The result feels as much like a seance as theatre, a kind of collective hallucination. The mouth seems to hover and move; we know that we are in a darkened theatre surrounded by others, but like that panicked dislocated mouth up above, we feel as if we are utterly alone. It is an extraordinary experience, completely immersive, which demands much of Dwan and the audience, too. We long for silence and the comforting rise of house lights, but we also fear their exposure. As Beckett himself might put it: we can't go on; we go on. But, unlike the trapped mouth on the stage, we walk out of theatre knowing we've been given one more chance to live.

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